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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 5/5/11

National Symbolism & National Security:

By       (Page 1 of 1 pages)   2 comments
Message Anthony J. Gerst
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On 9/12 my flag began flying for several months, brought in at night and in inclement weather. My flag has not been flying much lately, problems with securing it properly. On May 2, I affixed this flag to fly twenty-four-seven. Not many flags were flying on May 2. This is something, I hope, changes in the near future. We Americans came together after 9/11. Once again with the death of Bin Laden we have a chance to reunite our voices.

We have an economic problem in this nation that afflicts 98 percent of us. That problem is the Hayek/Friedman economic policies of the Chicago School of Economic Thought. I will only address one aspect of this today, the outsourcing of national security to private interest.

After 9/11 the Pentagon outsourced 270 billion dollars a year, to private companies, ask any soldier who has been overseas, whether they were meant by a Haliburton employee when they arrived at their camp. U.S. intelligence agencies' outsourced 42 billion a year for collecting information, double the amount from 1995, from 2001-2006 Homeland Security spent 130 billion on private contractors to conduct business that should've been the preview of the U.S. military/intelligence services. In 2003, the Bush administration, spent 327 billion dollars on these services from private companies. This in effect has been a large transfer of public dollars to corporate interests in our nation. Sources for this information include, Roger Cressey, a former Bush counterterrorism official now President of Good Harbor Consulting.

You want more specific examples, since 9/11 thirty-million surveillance cameras have been installed in America. These record four-billion hours of footage a year. Many companies, deriving their funding from public sources have arisen to create analytic software to search this database, resulting in an extensive number of citizens being put on watch lists. Do you really want to trust your national security to programs that generate thousands of suspects based upon analysis generated looking for a single individual? Do you want your security handled by corporations like Haliburton, Salient Stills and Booz Allen Hamilton? It is time we take back our national security and put it under the jurisdiction of the American Government. It is time we stop bailing out and shoveling public funds into private corporations, time to put the genie back in the bottle. It is time to focus on the 98 percent of Americans and not the top 2 percent and their corporate allies. Sources here include, "Big Time Security," Forbes, August 3, 2006 and, Fact Book 2007, www.cia.gov;.

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Anthony J. Gerst, is an author/columnist and activist. He resides near the confluence of the Iowa and Mississippi Rivers. His favorite author, Mark Twain, was an editor for the Muscatine Journal near where he lives. Mr. Gerst has offered (more...)
 

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